The People VS. Larry Flynt Review, by KENNETH TURAN, TIMES FILM CRITIC Wednesday December 25, 1996

In its excesses and extravagances, its fascination with sex,
religion, celebrity, bad taste and making a whole lot of money, there is
no more American story than that of combative pornographer and Hustler
magazine publisher Larry Flynt. So it's poetic and appropriate that an
immigrant director, Czech-born Milos Forman, has had the clarity to turn
it into a provocative and engrossing motion picture.

Working from a shrewd and pointedly funny script by Scott Alexander &
Larry Karaszewski, the team responsible for "Ed Wood," Forman's
contributions have enlarged "Larry Flynt" in ways other filmmakers might
not have managed.

The most obvious is having an eye for casting and a zest for mixing
professionals with real people, an openness to using folks such as
political consultant James Carville and Flynt himself (playing a
hard-nosed judge) in cameos. And having the nerve to choose rock star
Courtney Love to play opposite Woody Harrelson and being rewarded with a
live-wire piece of work, both kinetic and kittenish, that stands as one
of the most original performances of the year.

Forman, witness films from "Loves of a Blonde" through "One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Valmont," also has a willingness to tolerate
ambiguity. Despite his name in the title, "The People vs. . . . " is not
interested in glorifying Larry Flynt, quite the opposite. It rather
delights in showing how this crass and cold-eyed hustler, a man of wildly
contradictory and often offensive urges and impulses, ended up, to his
own great surprise as much as anyone's, doing something significant for
society.

What Flynt finally did was take a legal dispute with the Rev. Jerry
Falwell about a noxious Hustler ad parody (showing the reverend losing
his virginity to his mother in an outhouse) all the way to the Supreme
Court. The top court's unanimous 1988 ruling, for the first time granting
1st Amendment protection to parody, is considered a free speech landmark.

In this area, too, "The People vs. Larry Flynt" benefits from having a
filmmaker who lost his parents to the Nazis and grew to adulthood under
Communist censorship. While it's hard to imagine native-born directors
getting worked up about 1st Amendment rights they take for granted,
Forman's life experiences turn those freedoms into issues he can be
passionate and persuasive about.

All this is yet to come when "The People vs. Larry Flynt" opens in
1952 in a decrepit shack in the woods of East Kentucky, where 10-year-old
moonshiner Larry (helped by his 8-year-old brother Jimmy) is so intent on
making a buck that he doesn't hesitate to physically attack his alcoholic
father for "drinking my profits."

Twenty years later Larry (Woody Harrelson) and Jimmy (real-life
brother Brett Harrelson) are still chasing the main chance, this time by
running go-go dancers through a series of unimpressive Hustler Clubs in
Ohio.

The men's magazine starts as a simple newsletter for the clubs, but
Flynt, who enjoys getting worked up, soon turns messianic in his
determination to topple Hugh Hefner by printing the most graphic shots of
genitalia he can get away with. His own most satisfied customer, Flynt
harangues his dubious confederates, many of whom have trouble telling
even-numbered pages from odd, by holding up the rival publication and
screaming, "Who is this magazine for anyway? Seven million people buy it,
but nobody reads it. Playboy is mocking you."

About this time Larry meets too-young dancer Althea Leasure, a brazen
erotic sprite whom Courtney Love, alternately vampish and vulnerable,
invests with a natural blowzy sensuality. Bisexual, easily bored,
invariably jealous, Love's Althea and Woody Harrelson's shrewd,
promiscuous Flynt are no Hallmark card, but the actors connect
beautifully and make the couple's love for each other vivid and
undeniable.

Almost immediately, Flynt's off-putting magazine gets him in trouble
with the authorities, introducing him to Alan Isaacman (Edward Norton), a
committed civil liberties lawyer (and composite of several Flynt
attorneys) who starts to educate his client (and the audience) about the
overarching importance of constitutional rights.

A different kind of trouble is provided by evangelist and presidential
sister Ruth Carter Stapleton (played by TV anchor Donna Hanover). With
her flirtatious encouragement, Flynt's life takes another unexpected turn
as he becomes the unlikeliest of born-again Christians. This is much to
the despair of Althea, who rightly points out that "nobody on this planet
wants religion and porn together."

Everything changes yet again in 1978, when Flynt is shot leaving a
Georgia courthouse, an attack that leaves him paralyzed below the waist
and increasingly addicted to painkilling drugs, which become a problem
for his wife as well.

Flynt and Althea relocate to Los Angeles ("we ought to move somewhere
perverts are welcome" is his wry rationale), where outrageous courtroom
antics like showing up in an American flag diaper and tossing oranges at
a judge demonstrate Flynt's ability to turn everything into a circus and
a travesty.

Though Woody Harrelson's intensity and charisma make Flynt magnetic,
he is more terrifying and self-destructive than someone we admire, which
is the film's point. His chaotic story mirrors "The People vs. Larry
Flynt" in being without conventional boundaries, a saga that could only
happen in a country where, as Flynt himself puts it, "everybody gets
their shot, even a pig." His may have been the classic unexamined life,
but "The People vs. Larry Flynt" does us all a favor by scrutinizing it
to memorable effect.